1. Technical Field
The invention relates in general to the field of mobile telephony, and more particularly to short message services (SMS) and the corresponding billing processes.
2. Prior Art
Telephone services which enable a call to be debited to the called party are known; after the call request, if the called party consents to the debiting, the connection is established and the call can take place.
However, at the present time there is only provision for billing the senders of short messages. Clearly, the problems of billing the recipient of a message are fundamentally different from those of voice calls, and in particular the different nature of the information content and the corresponding transmission protocol require ad hoc solutions which are totally unrelated to the existing procedures for managing voice calls debited to the called party.
The object of the present invention is to enable short messages to be sent with the cost debited to the recipient, this debiting to the recipient being allowed only if the latter has previously authorized the sending number for the operation.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method for sending short messages with debiting to the recipient which enables both the recipient's number and the data for the type of billing to the recipient to be sent together with the message.
Finally, another object of the present invention is to provide a method for sending short messages with debiting to the recipient which is based on the typical network architecture of SMS management systems and which uses communication protocols which are standard in the mobile telephony field, in order to make the service inexpensive and immediately usable.